In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.
SALMAN RUSHDIEFree speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It’s also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
-
-
Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
No, I don’t think it’s fair to label Islam ‘violent.’ But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there’s just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
What I do think is evident is that those countries in the world where Islamic extremism has recovered the most power, those are also the countries which are most disliked.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
I don’t dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don’t want that to be dictated to me either.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it’s melancholy rim, green in it’s envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it’s greatest rages, black.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
We all owe death a life.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
Reality is a question of perspective.
SALMAN RUSHDIE -
But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
SALMAN RUSHDIE